Stalking the Sun

Every day I am drawn to the small world, the power to peek into something very small and see the depth and the layering it contains. Eye candy where candy stands for drug. Mind candy for those of us drawn to writing and photography, to the process of exploring the layers, sometimes exposing the layered-ness, of capturing the light or truth however you choose to name it. But where some seek truth, I am again and again seduced by many facets and ways of seeing at once, by detail upon detail that make the whole we cannot see the parts of. (Back to Melville, can I get rid of that blasted whale?) I don’t think I seek to expose, but rather revel in the seeing.

It’s also the beauty of the digital and the hyperlinked. Yesterday, I was contemplating the Wayback Machine the engine of the Internet Archive that creates a copy of the World Wide Web once every two months — just think about it — and of some pieces of it much more often and stores all that at a temple in San Francisco. The Web is based on the hypertext transfer protocol (http) which was created in 1989 which in turn reminded me of my own early adventures with email when the text was green on a UNIX machine in 1987 and my laptop was an Apple 145B in 1993. But above all it brought back to me how it felt to discover that you could have one piece of text and behind parts of it (or all of it I suppose if you’d been Virginia Woolf) there could be whole different pieces of text or photos that explained each one.

Imagine. From there to here and I am still alive enough to crawl across the ice on that damned bog at lunchtime when I am working at home and try to stop the sun in its tracks and post the pictures at night after working all day and then in the evening doing some reading for a serious piece of commentary with many hyperlinks to learned texts that’ll show up here one of these days.